BuddyPress Moderation Plugin: A Must-Have Community Management Tool

As a BuddyPress admin, you always have the ability to delete users and content. However, if you have a very active community, it can be overwhelming to attempt to police your site for inappropriate content or behavior. Hiring moderators may not be a cost-effective option for your site.

This is where BuddyPress Moderation steps in as a solution to help site owners keep their communities in line. It uses crowdsourcing to manage the task of moderation sitewide by attaching flags to content created within the various components. Francesco Laffi has been working tirelessly on this plugin as part of his Google Summer of Code project and this is the first stable release.

How does BuddyPress Moderation work?

BuddyPress site admins can elect to have the “flag” button placed next to certain content types, including status updates, activity comments, blog posts, blog pages, blog comments, members, groups, forum topics, and forum posts. The admin can set an automatic warning for users whose content has been flagged and automate deletion after a set number of violations.

The moderation queue in the dashboard shows each flagged item, how many flags the user has received, the reporter, order and filters, and actions that can be taken for each.

The moderation panel also has hotkeys built in, similar to the WordPress comments table hotkeys, for quick navigation and management.

Francesco also included documentation with some examples for integrating it with your own content types. After a fair bit of initial testing, I haven’t found any bugs. I can’t think of a site that wouldn’t benefit from adding BuddyPress Moderation, even if it’s only activated on a select few content types. It’s unobtrusive and keeps your BuddyPress community healthy and balanced. Depending on how active your community is, this plugin can keep members from spreading sour vibes and help your community to flourish. BuddyPress Moderation is a must-have tool for community management.

Sarah Gooding on Google+